Kantian View of Perception

Perception

1.1. Whenever we see/perceive, we always see/perceive it as something. We do not just see without having determined what we are seeing.

1.2. The world is represented to us in our minds. But if our minds did not have a way to understand what is being represented, the picture would just be a confused jumble and we will be disoriented. If we put a goldfish in front a television screen it cannot make sense of the images, because it does not have a developed perceptual apparatus to understand the signs/symbols as human beings do. The goldfish might react to sudden brightness, or change of light intensity, but not to individual objects as they emerge. This is because it cannot understand those objects; its perceptual system cannot process the image, which to it is just a bunch of raw uninterrupted signs.

1.3. These signs/symbols when represented in the mind are processed by the human perceptual system. This perceptual system subconsciously makes judgements regarding these signs. It picks out objects from their surroundings, labels these objects, labels their surfaces (colour, texture), it judges the depth of vision, the brightness of light, identifies the space (as one’s bedroom or school), and identifies objects which were not there earlier, or highlights things which have newly appeared, and only after a complex set of judgements, this picture completely labelled is presented to us. That is what we call seeing!

1.4. If we want to investigate particular parts of what we are seeing, then we focus on those parts, and our visual apparatus yields us more specific knowledge of these parts.

1.5. Example: We do not consciously separate objects that we pick out from their background. It would take a tremendous amount of calculation to clearly identify the silhouette of a rabbit sitting against the background of a tree. It would require knowledge of how the shades which appear closer to the shade of the skin of the rabbit belong to the rabbit and so on. Or for example when we see a man holding a hat in his hand, we immediately recognize as such, and not as another organism with a slightly different limb on the right side of the body. Neither do we ever see protons, neutrons, photons, and not just because they are so small, but because our visual system is not interested nor designed to see them. Whatever is presented to it, the visual system will try to understand it using the concepts that are hard-wired into it.

1.6. Example: we are able to pick out objects from their background on the basis of depth perception. Now this judgement is not an obvious one, and requires two eyes to work simultaneously, with slightly conflicting angles. If we close one eye and put two fingers out in front of your eyes in such a way that one is closer than the other, then one cannot judge which one is closer. You need to as if look behind the fingers, with the other eye, from an angle. And to put these two angles, of conflicting images together, requires a complex judgement. And that is performed by the perceptual system.

1.7. Processing the light that impinges on the visual system is so complicated that it can be compared to the following situation: Imagine lot of people simultaneously jumping into a pool, but you can’t see them, you can only register a splash, and on the basis of the particulars of the splash you determine exactly who has jumped and at which part of the pool. This kind of a confused jumble of light signals reaches the visual system, which is immediately and automatically able to make judgements regarding what is what and where.

1.8. Thus this input data only appears as such because the perceptual system has the categories and the apparatus which enables it to interpret the way it does. This situation is also similar to light being refracted in a prism whereby the entire spectrum becomes visible. Now the spectrum is an aspect of light, which only comes to light in the presence of some apparatus which can separate wavelengths. And, if that apparatus was no where available one would never know that light had this quality. Our perceptual system is similar to this. Without it, there is no such thing as an apple, or an orange. These objects emerge only after the perceptual system processes the data in its own particular way. So, while one may grant that there is some extra-mental existence which produces the data, but the form/shape of the data is beyond our understanding. Because our understanding is of things as they appear after they have been processed by the visual system, not before it. So, whatever is before it is necessarily unrecognizable.

1.9. If one suggests that there must be some thing corresponding to the apple which produces the apple in our minds then one may respond in the following way: (1) Apple as we know it is not uninterrupted data which we do not recognize, it has a particular form which we do recognize, so that thing is not an apple (This is analogous to the difference between a chocolate sitting on a shelf, and chocolate being tasted on the tongue. The taste is not identical to the chocolate on the shelf. It necessarily requires a human interpreter of chocolate to bring about that taste.) (2) The problem with associating a particular thing corresponding to an apple amounts to a claim that we can pick this object out from existence. How does one pick out red from a stream of light without a prism?

1.10. Thus apples and oranges do not enter our visual system. Data does, which is then labelled by our perceptual system as apples and oranges. Outside of human scheme of objects there are no such things as apples and oranges-because “apples” and “oranges” is an imposed scheme that arises in the mind, and which necessarily require a mind to arise. When we close our eyes, there is no interpretation on the input data, then there are no apples and there are no oranges. But if you say you can touch them and tell, then again, the same arguments apply: your tactile systems are again at work in a way that create forms out of the tactile data and identifies it as an object. (Note: Without the visual apparatus one would never know what an apple looks like, but only how it feels like. Stretching it further, without the tactile apparatus, one could only taste the apple and not feel it. If we did not have the perceptual and tactile apparatuses could we in any way speculate how the thing that tastes would look like or feel like? Likewise, there may be 10 other ways of interpreting data (we have 5 ways) but this depends on the interpreter. What is the objective way of interpreting data? One may interpret the world by just looking at electromagnetic activity (and there won’t be any apples, and the judgements regarding separating objects will probably introduce an entirely new classification of things). What is wrong with that? Only that human beings don’t do it that way.

1.11. Outside of a human judgement there are only marks, symbols, lacking an interpretation, lacking any human meaning, like random scribbling on a piece of paper. The world is a language, a set of signs, which without human beings (as interpreters) would be without the meanings we (are designed to) associate to it.

1.12. A less philosophical corollary: Perhaps one could say, in the light of this, that outside of human judgement there are marks, symbols, lacking an interpretation, lacking any human meaning, like random scribbling on a piece of paper. The world is a language, a set of signs, which without human beings (as interpreters) would be without the meanings we (are designed to) associate to it.